Freelance Writer/Editor

Inc.

15 April 2019

I wrote an insider's guide to Denver's start-up scene for the March/April issue of Inc. See here for the online version.

Many are drawn to Denver--Inc.'s No. 8 Surge City--for its laid-back, weed-friendly culture, which certainly doesn't stop with its plethora of cannabis startups. Here's everything you need to know about the city's entrepreneurial scene, from which investors to meet with to where to do Bend and Blaze yoga.

Hot Deal Spots

Entrepreneurs and investors take meetings at Denver Central Market, a warehouse-turned-gourmet food hall in the heart of the River North (RiNo) district, which flaunts a creamery, a butcher, a bakery, a fish­monger, and a wood-fired pizzeria. "It's slammed," says Tom Higley of early-stage accelerator 10.10.10, "but you can always find a seat."

The Commons on Champa, formed by a public-private partnership four years ago, is a hub for early-stage startups that provides free co-working space, with the option to rent out conference rooms and event space.

Cultivated Synergy is where cannapreneurs congregate. This lively co-working space in the RiNo district has communal work­spaces, five private offices--occupants include a concentrates company and a payroll firm--and Bend and Blaze yoga. At night, it transforms into an event venue where even non­members can attend everything from beer tastings and bat mitzvahs to budtender-appreciation parties.

Neighborhoods

Tech execs and employees tend to work and live in bustling LoDo (Lower Downtown), given its proximity to co-working spaces CTRL Collective and two WeWorks, Facebook and Slack outposts, the commuter rail to the airport--and Kimbal Musk's restaurant, the Kitchen.

CBD (no, not that--the Central Business District) was once a neighborhood just for finance and energy stalwarts. Today, startups including Geospiza, Nanno, and Salt have colonized the area.

STATS

$27.02

Average cost per square foot of office space for the Denver metro area.

Source: The Downtown Denver Partnership

45

Number of co-working spaces in central Denver.

Source: The Downtown Denver Partnership

216

cannabis dispensaries and 272 indoor-grow locations reside in Denver.

Source: Excise and Licenses, City and County of Denver

Red Flags

The city has yet to see a unicorn. "We'll get seed and Series A funding, but then usually have to raise capital from the coasts," says Paul Foley, managing director at SmartCapital. When it comes to VC capital, Foley estimates that New York City gets 20 percent, Northern California gets 40 percent, and Denver gets a meager 0.6 percent. "So companies here exit earlier," he says. "You get faster, smaller exits."

The Players

Chris Onan, a co-founder of Galvanize, a Denver-based national coding school, is a strategy consultant-turned-venture capitalist who has invested in more than 200 companies. Onan can typically be found linking startups in the Denver-Boulder tech scene with talent or capital. "He's a super­connector," says Erik Mitisek, co-founder of Denver Startup Week. "He's our VC prince of the city."

Jenna Walker.CREDIT: Laura Murray

Jenna Walker was a professional photographer before co-founding online photo book Artifact Uprising. She sold her Denver-based company to VSCO in 2014, and recently became entrepreneur-in-residence of Techstars Sustainability in Partnership with the Nature Conservancy, which backs 10 entrepreneurs per year, like those behind Node, a Seattle-based company that makes eco prefab homes.

Erik Mitisek.CREDIT: Courtesy subject

Erik Mitisek, the chief innovation officer for Colorado governor John Hickenlooper and former CEO of the Colorado Technology Association, is indispensable when it comes to startups in this town. He co-founded Denver Startup Week, launched the Commons on Champa and the online booking agent Next Great Place, and is now president of financial software company IMAgine Analytics.

Brands to Watch

Jaclyn Fu and Lia Winograd launched Pepper, maker of bras for small-chested women, in 2017. "Most bra companies design for a single standard size: 36C," and then scale it up or down, says Fu. Pepper fixes the "cup gap."

If you're still searching for your ideal cannabis, order a genetic test from Green Genomix. The early-stage company, founded by Jackson Rowland, will send a DNA collection kit to analyze genetics like CB1 receptors, and then provide a report revealing which strain, consumption method, and ratio of CBD to THC is best for you.

Amy Baglan was on OkCupid and Match, but "it was such a sad experience," she says. An avid yogi with a regular meditation practice, in 2015 she launched MeetMindful, a dating app for the mindful-living crowd.

Founded by Bryan Leach in 2012, Ibotta makes a shopping app that allows people to earn cash back on everyday purchases. It's one of the largest consumer tech companies in Denver, with 500 employees.

CREDIT: Aaron Meshon

Talent Pipeline

University of Denver's Project X-ITE runs an entrepreneurship workshop series, an incubator, and an accelerator that has produced startups including Boobi Butter, which makes breast-care products and encourages women to get regular breast exams.

Accelerator and venture fund Canopy­Boulder has invested in a slew of cannabis-related companies, including digital signage outfit GreenScreens and Würk, a payroll company.

Early-stage accelerator 10.10.10 invites 10 successful serial entrepreneurs to Denver to solve one of 10 "wicked problems" in 10 days. Graduates include Spout, maker of a device that can be used with a smartphone to analyze the levels of lead and other contaminants in a drop of water.

Recent Big Exits

$2 billion SendGrid, to Twilio (2018)

$1.68 billion ViaWest, to Peak 10 (2017)

$230 million Craftsy, to NBC Universal (2017)

Recently Funded Startups

Welltok, a health care software company, raised $75 million in 2018, bringing its total funding to a reported $251.7 million.

CyberGRX, a cyber-risk platform company, raised $30 million in 2018.

Galvanize, one of the largest coding schools in the United States, raised $32 million in 2018­--bringing its total funding to more than $167 million--and then acquired San Francisco-based Hack Reactor.

26 November 2018

Turns out, there's lots of money to be made by servicing the companies that are growing and selling legal weed. I wrote this piece for the November issue of Inc.

Marijuana has had a shady past, but it's on the cusp of having a very conventional future. In 2017, U.S. consumers spent $8.5 billion on legal cannabis, a number projected to grow to $23.4 billion by 2022. With that growth has emerged an entire ecosystem of startups that support the less sexy side of cannabis. Not the luxury dispensaries or rose-hued vape-pen companies, but the infrastructure that keeps them going--from software systems to package-design firms. As legalization continues to spread--it's now permitted in 31 states, Washington, D.C., Guam, and Puerto Rico--so will the B2B industry solving cannabis's thorny challenges.

The Instagram Effect

Advertising regulations vary from state to state, but most national publications won't accept ads--and neither will Facebook. Instagram, however, generally does not flag cannabis content, so it has become a critical marketing tool.

Cannabis journalist Ricardo Baca has Grasslands, a well-respected cannabis PR firm in Denver. New York City-based North 6th Agency represents a handful of cannabis com­panies including BDS Ana­lytics and venture fund Canopy, both in Boulder, while San Diego-based CMW Media focuses on pharma­ceutical cannabis.

How High Will You Get?

In states where cannabis is legal, every bit has to be tested and labeled for levels of THC (tetra­hydrocannabinol, the substance that produces a high) and CBD (cannabidiol, which does not produce a high), along with, in many cases, pesticide residues, contaminants, and fungus. If a farm's crop doesn't make the grade, it's not allowed to sell it.

A handful of regulatory-driven testing labs have launched, including Cascadia Labs in Oregon, Pure Analytics in California, and Evio Labs, the largest publicly traded testing company, with nine sites.

The Future Is Female

Since female plants produce much higher levels of THC and CBD than males, growers always cull the males. Traditionally, cannabis growers "grow out" crops, which takes six to eight weeks, to determine the sex.

Portland, Oregon-based Phylos Bioscience, which is mapping the genome of cannabis online at the Galaxy, sells a DNA "sex test," which allows growers to quickly and accurately identify sex. "It saves a lot of money spent on feeding, watering, and lighting the males," says Phylos co-founder Mowgli Holmes, who has collected samples from 80 countries, making Phylos's database of cannabis genetics the largest in the world.

29 May 2018

Love the Wild's clever packaging. The delicious sauces are frozen in the shape of hearts.

I must admit: as an Oregonian who has subscribed to a wild salmon share for the last 3 years, I'm not a fan of the idea of farmed fish. I had this naive and outdated notion that all fish farms are crowded, dismal places, teeming with sea louse. In 2010, I had read in Paul Greenberg's book Four Fish, The Future of the Last Wild Food that farmed salmon had a terrible feed-to-conversion ratio: typically, farmed salmon need to eat six pounds of wild fish for every pound of flesh. But that has changed over the past eight years as some fish farms have found alternative feeds.

According to the Global Salmon Initiative, the average salmon farm today has a feed-conversion-ratio of 1.3:1. Kvarøy Fiskeoppdrett in Norway, which a sustainable seafood company called Love the Wild began sourcing from last year, is replacing fish meal with microbial proteins, algae-based oils, and grains, making their feed-conversion-ratio an impressive 0.47 to 1. I write about Love the Wild in the June issue of Inc. (pg. 48 if you have a subscription). Here's a PDF of my piece.

Meanwhile, I'm not quitting my Fish CSA, but I'm also going to be more open-minded about trying sustainably-raised farmed fish. Even Paul Greenberg agrees that we cannot live on wild fish stocks alone. Last year he was interviewed for NPR's the Salt about his Frontline documentary the Fish on my Plate and he said, "People often compare wild fish to farmed fish, but what we should really be doing is comparing fish to other forms of protein." Beef is way more resource-heavy than farmed fish. Love the Wild founder Jacqueline Claudia told me something similar.

"I’m not trying to win against wild fish. Truth be told: It’s some of my favorite fish. For me, it's farmed fish vs. farmed pork, farmed chicken, and farmed beef," she told me. "Great farmed fish is your daily driver—that’s what you eat during the week. On the weekend you get something wild and sustainable and you celebrate its terroir."

25 May 2018

I wrote about Ben Jacobsen and his Oregon-harvested artisanal sea salt for Inc.'s May issue.

Netarts Bay, a protected estuary on the Oregon Coast, is an ideal spot to harvest salt. [Photo: Carlos Chavarría]

While attending business school in Copenhagen in 2004, Ben Jacobsen fell in love with Maldon sea salt, the flaky finishing salt prized by chefs. Returning to the United States--landing in Portland, Oregon--he was shocked to find that no one here was harvesting anything like that high-end sea salt.

After his mobile-app-discovery startup went belly-up, Jacobsen began lugging 275-gallon wine totes of seawater from Netarts Bay back to his home in Portland, where he re-created the laborious (and messy) process of evaporating the water to make salt. "I destroyed cookware and pots and pans and made a mess in the oven and everything else," Jacobsen says. "It was definitely a learning experience." Today, his category-defining American flaky sea salt is the favored salt of celebrity chefs.

The process of salt-making is now much more efficient at Jacobsen's 6,000-square-foot production facility on the Oregon coast, where the company has built custom equipment. Jacobsen's 42-person crew harvests 18,000 pounds of salt per month, which is then sent to the warehouse in Portland's Central Eastside to be packaged and shipped out to Williams Sonoma, Whole Foods, and thousands of other retailers across the country. "Like the people who went to California 240 years ago and wondered if it was possible to grow grapes and make wine there," says Jacobsen, "we're the first in our category to make great salt in the U.S. mainstream."